Customer Reviews

The Complete Walking With... Collection

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this for my son's 4th birthday. I have an interest in archaeology/paleontology that seem's to have rubbed off on him. Over the past year he has viewed the entire 5 disc set a few times a month. It's great to pull out on a rainy/snowy days. The dvds help to reinforce scientific terminology and stimulate conversation. You just need to keep in perspective that it is an imagined story about about each of the species and subscribes to the current theory that dinosaurs were more closely related to birds than reptiles. The colors and sounds are vivid and hold your attention. Another nice feature is that if you have a multi-disc dvd player, all five will play in order. I think this is a nice family set that is not too scary or gory for even the little ones to enjoy. It was a big hit while it was playing at my son's dinosaur themed birthday party too!

WALKING WITH DINOSAURS - This six part three hour long special explores the time while the dinosaurs ruled the earth. This fantastic journy has more dino shots then all three Jurassic Park films combined. The dinos are very realistic and make you fell like your there. We get to see the whole story from how the dinosaurs took over to there very end and all of the wonderful things that happen inbetween. It resembles a nature film only with dinosaurs pure genius. The only problem with this is that it shows the raptors with scaled bodys when in reality they had feathers. This is a wonderful and inventive film that is worth own to anyone.

ALLOSAURS - This half hour film seems to work as a small add on to Walking with dinosaurs. It deals with the life and death of an allosaurs named Big Al. Allosaurs serves as a nice half hour film that will please fan of Walking with Dinosaurs. It also contains a half hour making of film called Big Al uncovered.

WALKING WITH PREHISTORIC BEASTS - This six part three hour long film deals with the time after the dinosaurs and ends around today. It has just as realistic effects as the first film which has to be harder then Walking with dinosaurs because of hair. This epic story has primitive whales, hyenas the size of rhinos, and rhinos the size of three elephants. Like its predeceser it resembles a nature film only with extinct animals. Despite the fact that these creatures are a lot closer to todays animals then the dinos it still is just as intresting as Walking with Dinosaurs. This is a wonderful and inventive film that is worth watching for anyone.

All three films are in 1.78 anamorphic widescreen that is perfect for widescreen tvs not to mention it has one of the cleanest image transfers on any DVD. The main problem is sound. Instead of a good doby digital Walking with Dinosaurs and Allosaurs have only 2.0 doby surround Walking with Prehistoric Beasts has an even worse 2.0 digital stero. This is still a great DVD set with two supplement discs that include three fifty minute making of documentaries. I just hope this is not the last Walking with.

If your children like dinosaurs, there is no better series on them than 'Walking With . . .' DO NOT bother with 'When Dinosaurs Ruled' (awful by comparison) or even 'When Dinosaurs Roamed America' (not bad but still pales). This is a marvelous collaboration between scientists and artists, and the result will take your breath away. It's also quite humorous in parts, in a very English way. And Kenneth Branagh brings his usual excellence to the narration. A must see.

Everyone has summed it up, this is a good as it gets in the doco world. Pure, undiluted quality. Fantastic animation, production values, narration and all around a+ performance, many of the effects in this series would not look out of place in a feature film, indeed the guys at Framestore have gotten so good at doing this they beat ILM at their own game at times IMO.

However, it's not really the 'complete' Walking with Collection, there have been 5 new episodes since this was released in the form of the BBC's followup new 'Chased by Dinosaurs' series (known as special episodes of Walking with Dinosaurs in the UK though still). They covered big dinosaurs like Argentionsaurus and the Gigantosaurus and lots of sea creatures like the giant shark Megadolon. Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the series.

You get 5 dvd's in this collection. One dvd is entirely devoted to 'Big Al' the Alasaurus who's fossil was discovered in Wyoming where now a gravesite exists(149 million B.C-'Big Al'[The Predator Who Couldn't] because he died at 6(a year before his prime) of exposure waiting for rain to come to a dried up river. The poor guy was pretty banged up including a severely infected/swollen toe that pretty much spelled his doom. On the main disc you get 8 30 minute episodes of 'Walking W Dinosaurs' that starts with the early Triassic(the birth of dinosaurs) and ends with the End of Cretaceous Extinction(the end of them except the birds which are dinosaurs although they don't look much like them). Each episode deals in depth with different dinosaurs,the huge fern eating ones, the not so huge but heavily armored ones, the carniverous ones, the marine reptiles, the dinosaurs that lived at the South Pole 106 million years ago before the planet started to freeze and T-Rex who evolved just a few million years before the end of them. Even without the comet strike it seems they were on their way out due to a massive and fast increase in volcanism(but not on the scale of the Permian Extinction). It's good alternative viewing to Sunday football. Disc 3 is 'Walking With Beasts' and covers the period from 50 million years ago to about 30,000 years ago,(just about the time Cro-Magnums were offing the last of the Neanderthals). It's just as good as 'Walking W Dinosaurs' and has a very well done take on the dawn of humanity I think. The other two discs deal with the making of the previous 2 discs. This collection does not include 'Walking W Monsters' which is also very good but you'll have to buy it separately.

I'm not really a big fan of buying DVDs for specials or films that have already been shown on TV> Why would I want to pay $60 for a DVD of a show that I saw for free on Discovery Chanel? However the shows shown on Discovery channel are the exception to my rule. And "Walking With Dinosaurs" is one of the best.

This special is worth every penny of the advertised price if you can't find it airing on TV anytime soon. For a TV special, the effects were some of the best I've seen on television. The combination of computer generated and animatronic dinosaurs looked incredible, and really give you the feeling that we were able to capture these creatures on video. The great thing about this special is that, unlike traditional documentaries, they used the scientific evidence they had found to create a story, as they did with "Allosaurus."

Overall, while I tihnk that maybe this DVD would be a little better value around $40, the specials are, without a doubt, the best nature specials I have ever seen.

My husband and I bought this for our son when he was five years old. We thought it would be a little scary but our son loves it. He has watched it many times over the years. His knowledge of dinosaurs, the periods and what happened to them is amazing. This is great along with the computer game from the same company! Just amazing! We watched other dinosaur documentaries but this beats all!

Brilliant is an understatement to describe the best produced/animated "history" of the planet's prehistoric inhabitants. Vividly real creatures populate a landscape of constantly changing proportions.

And the makers of the series have even given the animals "personality" as they go about their daily struggles for survival in harsh and developing times.

This is a set for those that want their science informative and entertaining; in other words, a must-have for the student and the teacher.

Of course we all get the standard breeze-over learning about dinosaurs while going through elementary school. Then the movie Jurassic Park showed what technology could do in terms of recreating what dinosaurs looked like. Now this collection brings together the best of both worlds, teaching exactly what the best experts believe life was like in the time of the dinosaurs, combined with the ability to actually show it happening. It's tons of fun to watch and feel like a kid again, amazed by how much different the world was back then. I highly recommend this to kids, ages 1 to 100.

The BBC does it again with this special effects spectacular that details the lives of dinosaurs with astonishing realism. I am 51 years old and I loved this. A blast!